Preordered Knizia’s Royal Visit (reimplementation of an old game called Times Square) and Carcassonne: Exp 10 - Under the Big Top. Going to try the other expansions outside of Exp 1 and 2.
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Ooooh, new version by IELLO, yes please
Oh damn, that new art is gorgeous!
Went from interested and excited to ‘two player only’. Gah! (I rarely play with just one other person)
It would be cruel not to post a follow up.
Amazingly held off till after work.
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I have to admit when I’m wrong. Fortunately this is not the case and clearly they just misspelled “On” and “Mars”~
In other news, Kanban EV is a huge question mark for me. I remember watching some coverage of the original Kanban and thinking, “Oh, I might enjoy this… but I don’t know 1) if I’m ever going to say “Ooh, let’s play Kanban!” and b) who the heck am I going to play this with?”
I actually know the answer to B and, theoretically, he already has a copy and is thinking ‘Who the heck am I going to play this with?’ – so I should probably reach out to him and see if he wants to plan a post-pandemic Japanese electric automotive day.
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Kanban is also a big question mark for British backers, and they’ve already bought the game! 
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And a very pretty cover to boot!
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Would be lying if I said the art didn’t sway me on this. I really wish eagle gryphon stopped making gorgeous games.
For the immediate future, I can see me playing this alone, lockdown is making solo gaming a far more appealing alternative.
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Feeling very tempted by a discount on a game that I have been chasing for a while: Merchants and Marauders. Which is not great, as I have already bought a game this month… Decisions, decisions… 
The Gallerist for me is the next and possibly last super chunky euro I try. Too many people say it’s good but I’m starting to think there’s a bit of a hive mind and safety first aspect of liking things (I think it’s why some kickstarters instantly get a million without a blink).
I feel like with tough euros I just end up with a headache due to tiredness but I’m rarely getting the easily describable joy out the game. To me if I can describe the joy of a game ina sentence then that is what makes a good game for me and interweaving mechanics makes that really hard.
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I have come to accept that big complex euros like your Lacerdas and Dujardins just aren’t for me. Not wanting to harsh anyone else’s mellow (man), and I suppose it’s possible that there’s something out there which will just click perfectly for me… but I’ve bounced off enough of them that I don’t really fancy putting in the effort any more.
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I used to have a rule for filtering games that I would like. I called it the Page 12 rule. If you take a game, open the box, pull out the rulebook and turn to page 12, consult the following logic:
- the page exists: skip the game
- the page does not exist: candidate for purchase/playing.
Obviously, I have strayed from my Page 12 rule considerably, but I still do find that some of the most enjoyable games are those with 4 pages or less of rules.
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12 page rule sounds like a good rule of thumb.
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I’m curious just how many of my favorite games would break this rule…
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As an experiment, I decided to review the page count of some of my favourite games (not counting playthroughs, blurb, solo rules, if postscript).
Napoleon’s Triumph: 10
Twilight Struggle: 11
Mage Knight: 20
Roads & Boats: 20
Through the Ages: 12
Indonesia: 7
Pax Pamir 2e: 15
Galaxy Trucker 16
The games coming in under 12 are more complex than those that don’t, but I guess all of these in principle would fail the candidacy test after the page 12 test.
Also, most complex game with shortest ruleset:
Tash-Kalar: 2
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Yeah. The problem with the rule is that a lot of games on the simpler end of the spectrum have very verbose rulebooks so as to be even more inclusive of all styles of players.
Whereas games designed to be dense tend to assume the player can and will best learn from very dense and technical rules.
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pillbox’s 2021 Purchase Tracker as of 2021-01-25: 0.1
As I will still talk about things as they arrive, let’s just make note of:
Newest addition codename: Fifteen (0.1 games worth of purchases, to be explained later)
[Edit: I assure you the reason is not† that pillbox has figured out how to buy 119 games this year under the guise of reduced consumerism]
†: probably
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I hope I am not getting the pillbox virus. I did buy Merchants and Marauders… ahoy, matey!!!
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Firefly for example is 20 pages, and could be done in a lot less. Homeland (same design team), similarly.
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